According to California authorities Wednesday, an investigation into a mysterious decomposing man has turned up a stockpile of weapons, cash, 6.5 tons ammunition and an underwater car.
“The story itself sounds totally crazy but then how do you explain all this?” Veteran defense attorney Harland Braun told The Associated Press. “There’s no evidence he was a drug dealer or he stole these weapons, or had any criminal source of income, no stolen property, all the stuff you’d look for.”
Braun was able to identify the dead man as Jeffrey Alan Lash. His body was found decomposing in a car parked in Pacific Palisades. By the time authorities found him on July 17 he had been dead for two weeks. Braun, who represents Lash’s fiancée Catherine Nebron, was the one that eventually notified police.
The investigation led to Lash’s home where detectives found 1,200 guns, scopes, bows and arrows, knives and machetes. They also found 6.5 tons of ammunition, $230,000 in cash and a Toyota SUV designed to drive underwater. Eight of the 14 cars registered to Lash have been found hidden across Los Angeles.
Braun told KTLA5 Lash refused to go to a hospital or let anyone call 911 after he collapsed in a Santa Monica grocery store parking lot. Nebron left him in the car before fleeing to Oregon with her employee Dawn VadBunker. The sudden disappearance of VadBunker prompted police to launch a missing persons investigation. She was eventually found with Nebron.
“He was just a loner, as far as we were concerned,” Shirley Anderson told the Los Angeles Times. “He just became weird because he changed all of a sudden.”
Anderson, a longtime partner of Lash’s late father, said she hadn’t seen Lash since 2010. She was notified of his death last week after receiving a call from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office. At the moment authorities believe the stockpile of weapons and various other items to be a private collection.
“He was either into doomsday survivalism, gun collecting or both,” LAPD Capt. William Hayes said, according to the Los Angeles Times.
According to the AP, however, Lash told Nebron he worked as an undercover operative for multiple unnamed government agencies. The couple had been together 17 years. The collection of guns is believed to be worth at least $500,000 and possibly more than $1 million.
“He was not very forthcoming about what he was doing,” Anderson also noted. “He had to be doing something to collect all those guns.”
VadBunker has another theory. She told her parents after returning home that she believed Lash to be a human-alien hybrid according to KTLA5.
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